473. Europe vs. Trump: Competing Visions for a Ukraine Peace Deal (Question Time)

Summary

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The Rest Is Politics – Episode 473

"Europe vs. Trump: Competing Visions for a Ukraine Peace Deal (Question Time)"

Date: November 26, 2025
Hosts: Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart

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Episode Overview

In this Question Time edition, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart unpack major international developments, focusing on the shifting dynamics around the Ukraine war, competing peace proposals from Europe and Trump’s America, the effectiveness of global summits absent US leadership, and the far-reaching implications of foreign influence in UK politics. The episode also tackles the West Bank's intensifying economic emergency, Addiction Awareness Week, and the challenges facing the BBC.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Europe, Trump, and the Ukraine Peace Deal

([03:39]–[17:38])

• Dueling Plans for Ukraine:
  The hosts compare the US-Russian 28-point draft for a Ukraine peace settlement with Europe's counter-proposal. Campbell details key differences:

  • The US draft includes soft language on Ukrainian sovereignty, NATO expansion, troop limits, and mediation by the US.
  • The EU revision toughens language: sovereignty is “reconfirmed” (never in doubt), troop caps are higher, ambiguous language is removed, and robust—not just "reliable"—guarantees are promised.
  • Quotes Campbell: "What struck me was the extent to which, if the Americans really were serious... this would have been the paper in the first place." ([06:20])

• America’s Unreliability and Europe’s Delusions:
  Stewart cautions about Europe’s ongoing denial regarding Trump’s true positioning:

  • "Europeans keep deluding themselves... that America’s basically on Europe’s side against Russia... but by now they should be beginning to realize... that these two different documents show two completely different worldviews." ([06:48])
  • Trump’s view aligns with Putin, believing Ukraine is “naturally part of Russia,” and NATO’s expansion provoked Moscow.

• Strategic Errors and Missed Opportunities:
  Both lament Europe’s inaction, misallocation of resources, and strategic dependence on US support:

  • Europe should have independently ramped up defence and support for Ukraine long ago ([10:33]).
  • "Ukraine has been firing a lot of American missiles, which it probably would have kept in reserve if it had known that the US was going to stop the future weapons supply." —Stewart ([11:27])
  • They agree Europe must now recognize Trump’s unreliability and prepare for US disengagement.

• Memorable Analogy:
  Stewart: "It would be like... going out for the night and putting my young child in charge of my house... I'm going to disable the alarm. I'm going to hand a pep astray to the person who's coming in through the door. Farewell. See you later." ([15:03])

2. Can Global Summits Succeed Without the US?

([17:38]–[29:34])

• G20, COP, and the “Multilateral Vacuum”:
  The hosts review recent summits (G20 in Johannesburg, COP in Brazil) in the shadow of Trump’s US withdrawal.

  • Stewart: The postwar multilateral system was created and sustained by the US. Its absence threatens the entire architecture: "When the United States is removed... the basic heart and engine of multilateralism collapses." ([18:06])

• Mixed Impact:

  • Campbell notes that European and “like-minded” countries must fill the vacuum and forge new agendas, especially as China and Russia court Africa and the Global South ([20:52]).
  • Despite US withdrawal, some diplomatic progress continues—summits matter more than ever for smaller states, and symbolic outcomes (protests at G20, for example) can have real local impact ([24:38]).

• Climate Deadlock:

  • On COP, Stewart notes: "80 countries sign up to a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and 80 countries reject it." ([26:19])
  • Europe shows relative leadership but without robust US commitments, global progress is slow or stalled.
  • Stewart laments worsening global inequality and ineffective panels unable to address rising poverty ([28:17]), and questions whether long-held UN ideals mean anything in the new world order.

3. Russian Influence, the Far Right, and UK Politics

([29:34]–[42:56])

• The Nathan Gill Scandal:
  Triggered by a listener’s question, the hosts are indignant about the muted coverage of Nathan Gill’s conviction for accepting Russian money to promote pro-Kremlin messaging in the European Parliament.

  • Campbell: "Nathan Gill should by now be a household name on a par with the spies of the past... That is a total chronic failure... of our media." ([30:27])
  • Stewart outlines Gill’s trajectory from UKIP to Reform UK and his “astonishingly cheap” price—*“£5,000 at a time”—*for political influence ([31:48]).

• Broader Threats and Systemic Corruption:

  • Stewart: "Is it actually plausible that there was only one involved?" Calls for wider investigations as other MEPs made near-identical speeches.
  • The issue extends beyond Russia; Gulf states, Azerbaijan, and “the American private sector” all have means to influence MPs, sometimes subtly (advisory contracts, paid trips, future jobs) ([37:44]).

• Failures of Political and Media Accountability:

  • Campbell: "Honestly. If I were the Labour government right now, I would publish all the stuff that came out during the Brexit referendum. I would have a major inquiry into Russian interference..." ([33:37])
  • The current political climate allows allegations of foreign influence to be brushed aside, while trivial matters dominate headlines.

• Russia’s Long Game:

  • Stewart references Chekhovstov’s work on Russia’s deliberate destabilization of Western democracies via support for far-right movements:
    "There will be hundreds of Russian intelligence officers... to shape the space... against liberal democracy, against NATO, against the European Union." ([41:16])
  • Concern is voiced that MPs’ reluctance to address this may stem from their own “guilty conscience” over foreign-funded perks.

4. The West Bank’s Collapsing Economy

([54:51]–[60:54])

• Severe Economic Crisis:
  The West Bank’s economy is unraveling due to Israeli-imposed financial strangleholds post-October 7:
  • Withheld import taxes, new surcharges, blocked remittances, and a threat to indemnity for Palestinian banks has triggered a 2.5 billion deficit, making it nearly impossible for the PA to pay public sector wages or provide services ([55:35]–[58:28]).
  • 240,000 Palestinians previously working in Israel are now jobless due to border closures.
  • The situation is described as “economic warfare,” risking collapse of the PA, as warned by the World Bank ([58:02]).
  • Stewart: "If there's no economy in the West Bank... those millions of Palestinians... can't function at all." ([59:37])

5. Addiction Awareness & Society’s Blind Spot

([60:54]–[67:24])

• Addiction’s True Cost:
  Prompted by Joe Wolff’s question, Campbell echoes the view that addiction is central to the business model for industries from tobacco and alcohol to gambling and social media.

• Personal Story – “The Conversation That Changed Everything”:

  • Campbell movingly recounts the moment a counselor gently helped him realize the grip alcohol had on his life ([63:00]–[67:24]).
  • "He kind of opened it up... I honestly think that conversation saved my life." ([66:40])
  • Both hosts praise Princess of Wales’ involvement in awareness campaigns, noting that destigmatizing addiction through public storytelling is crucial for societal progress and individual recovery.

6. Other Topics: BBC, UK Parliament, and Leadership

([50:08]–[54:51])

• BBC’s Leadership and Parliamentary Committees:
  Campbell and Stewart discuss the current crisis of confidence at the BBC, with Campbell highlighting the toothlessness of select committees and the growing difficulty of appointing non-partisan leadership ([51:35]–[54:51]).

• Parliamentary (Un)Professionalism:
  Stewart: US Senate hearings are far more rigorous than UK select committees, many MPs lack training, and witnesses can easily flatter their way through without real scrutiny.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Stewart on divergent US/EU Russia views:
  "These two different documents show two completely different worldviews." ([06:53])

• Campbell on urgency of Europe’s response:
  "We have reached this point of saying that Trump is a deeply unreliable ally..." ([09:46])

• Stewart’s analogy about US “abandoning” Europe:
  "I'm going to disable the alarm. I'm going to hand a pep astray to the person who's coming in through the door. Farewell. See you later." ([15:03])

• Campbell on the media’s “total chronic failure” over Nathan Gill:
  "I've been doing events and saying, who here has heard of Nathan Gill?... we're still talking single figures." ([30:27])

• Stewart on Russian influence operations:
  "The difference between us and the British is that we're not fundamentally an intelligence gathering organization. We're fundamentally about destabilizing and shaping other people's politics..." ([41:16])

• On addiction and recovery:
  Campbell, narrating his “conversation that changed everything” ([63:00]–[67:24]):

  "I said, No, I've had a breakdown, I was hearing voices... And then as I got through to about 11:20, went to the Lord High Admiral pub... had lunch with David Mellor... Suddenly, this very, very large penny dropped."

• Stewart on progress:
  "Maybe the biggest ever human achievement isn’t one invention or moment... it is... the way we keep moving forward together." ([49:30])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Ukraine, Trump & Europe: Competing Peace Plans: [03:39]–[17:38]
• Effectiveness of G20, COP and global summits without US: [17:38]–[29:34]
• Russian (and other) Foreign Influence in UK Politics, Nathan Gill case: [29:34]–[42:56]
• West Bank economic collapse: [54:51]–[60:54]
• Addiction Awareness Week & Alastair Campbell’s personal story: [60:54]–[67:24]
• BBC, select committees and parliamentary professionalism: [50:08]–[54:51]

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Tone & Style

• The episode maintains an urgent, candid, and often frustrated tone regarding the state of Western politics and international institutions, with both hosts melding their political experience with blunt, sometimes darkly comic, observations.
• They blend serious, sometimes personal testimony (Campbell on addiction) with policy analysis and sharp critique of media and political failings, always circling back to themes of public responsibility and the cost of delusion.

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For Further Engagement

• Newsletter sign-up and exclusive content: therestispolitics.com
• Addiction Awareness Week – “Conversation That Changed Everything”: #Letstalkaddiction, mention @ForwardTrust

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Final Takeaway

Europe stands at a crossroads: the era of relying on American stewardship—especially under Trump—is over. On Ukraine, the climate, or safeguarding democracy, only clear-eyed leadership, self-reliance, and public vigilance will hold the line. Failure to adapt—to foreign manipulation, to economic warfare, to addiction—brings grave consequences. As Campbell and Stewart repeatedly urge: "We can't give up now." ([29:34])

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Transcript

[Alistair Campbell]

Thank you so much for listening to the Rest Is Politics. Here's a thought for Christmas you can gift somebody membership to the Rest Is Politics. Plus ad free listening bonus episodes, early access to Q and A book discounts. So spread a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

And Fuse is now the fastest growing renewable energy supplier in the uk, putting sustainability at the heart of everything they do. Their new solar and wind farm projects are helping to build a cleaner, more resilient national grid, proving that renewable energy can be both affordable and scalable.

[Rory Stewart]

Every home that they power brings that future closer to the present, whether it's panels catching light or turbines turning across the country. And this is progress, which isn't measured just in targets and slogans, but in sunlight, in wind, in electricity, and a bit of British persistence.

[Alistair Campbell]

And progress is not always about shouting the loudest. It's about keeping the lights on intelligently and making clean energy something that everyone can afford.

[Rory Stewart]

The energy transition isn't tomorrow's problem, it's today. And Fuse Energy is actually doing something to address it.

[Alistair Campbell]

So switch to Fuse Energy today, using the code politics to save on your energy bills and help power a cleaner, more sustainable future.

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[Alistair Campbell]

Welcome to the rest is Politics Question.

[Rory Stewart]

Time with me, Alistair Campbell and with me Rory Stewart.

[Alistair Campbell]

And a bit of an about face week this week because we're going to be doing the main episode on the Budget live after the Budget.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

The UK Budget.

[Alistair Campbell]

The UK Budget, Yep. Oh, sorry, I forgot you were such an internationalist. And I'm just very domestic and focused on.

[Rory Stewart]

Exactly.

[Alistair Campbell]

That's the UK Budget presented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves. So we'll do that Wednesday afternoon. This is a sort of budget UK budget free zone.

[Rory Stewart]

Yes, Alistair. So we're going to look, I think, at the big international issues at the moment. We're going to return to Ukraine, which people I hope have listened to our pod where we went in detail into the Russia Trump Ukraine plan. We're going to look at these big multilateral meetings that have been happening this week, in particular particular cop and the G20, so climate and the G20. We're going to be looking at Russia and the far right in Europe and in particular the prosecution of Nathan Gill. And we're also going to be touching on some other issues that really matter, including Addiction Awareness Week.

[Alistair Campbell]

So Ukraine, Diane Stevenson, trip plus member from Hampshire does the rest of Europe, the democratic parts anyway, not realize that Putin has to be rolled back here and now? Why are we hesitating? Is it that we can't do without the usa or are we really so stupid to think he won't continue to invade if he's allowed to? So there's a lot in that. Now we went through the I think you're doing a huge service by calling it a plan. The U.S. russia plan. I think you mean the U.S. russia 28 point paper. I think you'd be struggling to call it a plan. What has happened since then, as we suggested it would, is that the Europeans and the Ukrainians have pushed back. Now we went through it point by point. And I think what we should do in the newsletter is try and put side by side, side the US Russian 28 point quotes, plan, close quotes and the counter proposal by the eu because it's a very clever piece of rewriting. I do, I have to say to take the hand of Jonathan Powell in some of it. Just to give you a couple. So the American text said Ukraine's sovereignty will be confirmed. Okay. The rewritten European test says it will be reconfirmed. In other words, it is never in doubt, and we're not going to put it in doubt. Now. The American version talked about all ambiguities from the last 30 years will be settled. The European version says they will be resolved. The paragraph about the expectation that Russia will not invade neighbours and NATO will not expand further has been deleted. The suggestion that the Americans should be a mediator between Russia and NATO has been deleted. Instead, it says there will be a dialogue between Russia and NATO. It talks about robust rather than reliable security guarantees. It ups the limit of Ukrainian forces, which the Americans wanted capped at 600,000 to 800,000. But as the words in peacetime. So through the whole thing and including membership of NATO, it basically says that in peacetime there can be one set of attitudes, and should Russia ever try to invade, to be aggressive again, then the all guarantees and all bets will be off. And reading it, what struck me was the extent to which, if the Americans really were serious and had been serious about this, I think this would have been the paper in the first place.

[Rory Stewart]

But I think. Let's go back to it. I mean, this is the fundamental problem that the Europeans have had from the beginning, which is believing that the Americans are on the European side.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, in which case, Diane is absolutely right and we've just got to stop pretending. Yeah.

[Rory Stewart]

And that's what I feel. I feel the fundamental way in which, unfortunately, the Europeans keep deluding themselves since January is they think America's basically on Europe's side against Russia and that there's some small misunderstanding. And if they just get on a plane or. Or rewrite a draft, Trump will suddenly see the truth. He'll suddenly realize that actually Russia poses a threat to Europe, that Russia invaded Ukraine, that Ukraine should defend itself. And they've tried it in different ways, haven't they? They tried it by these endless getting on planes. They've tried it with documents, with intelligence sharing. But by now they should be beginning to realize by November that they fundamentally disagree and that these two different documents show two completely different worldviews. The first document is the Russian worldview, which says basically Ukraine is really naturally part of Russia, that Ukraine is controlled by corrupt neo Nazis.

[Alistair Campbell]

The reference to Nazis is gone, by the way.

[Rory Stewart]

Surprisingly, that the whole expansion of NATO since the 1990s has been a provocation against Russia, and that Russia is just defending its own national security interests, that Russia is obviously winning and is a major geostrategic power comparable to the US And China, and that the natural thing to do is to hand over eastern Ukraine, including bits Russia hasn't currently got, to Russia, settling the issue, because Russia really deserves to dominate that part of the world. And the European point of view is the view that the United States had until the end of Biden, which is this is the most outrageous invasion of a European country, breaking of sovereign borders. Russia has gone into Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Almost a million have now been wounded. Cities have been destroyed. Hundreds of billions of dollars of damage have been done. The international borders have been shifted. Russia is responsible for war crimes, breaking of international law. And that if you care at all about sovereignty, the United nations, the democratic world order, we need to get behind Ukraine, push Russia back. And if we don't, we're going to face conflict. And those two views are totally different. And I'm afraid Trump is very much in the Putin camp. So the idea that you're going to turn him around by producing, yes. Another bit of paper, making exactly the same arguments that you've been making to him for 11 months, it's not going to work.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay? But what's happened, I think, with this piece of paper, this plan, this counter proposal, and look, there is a pattern to this. We've seen it several times now. The war is now going into its fourth winter. Come the middle of June, this war will have gone on for as long as the First World War. Okay? So there rightly should be an impetus by everybody to try to bring it to a halt. And every time that Putin seems to have wheedled the American side over to a certain way of thinking, the Europeans have managed to wheedle him back. What I think you're saying, what Dan's saying is Europe has to stop playing that game and understand, actually, this is the time to step up. So Keir Starmer's got this. Yet another hosting yet another coalition of the willing meeting today, Tuesday. That will probably push back a little bit more on the Americans. Zelenskyy will probably come out and welcome what they're saying, what they're doing. But I think we have reached this point of saying that Trump is a deeply unreliable ally. And we keep. You and I keep saying it, and lots of people that we know in those circles keep saying it. Does a point come where one or more of these European leaders takes the inevitable hit, diplomatically, economically and all security, all these Other ways that would come from actually coming up and saying Trump can no longer be relied upon either to respect the rule of law, respect international order, or to be a reliable ally for Europe.

[Rory Stewart]

And now beginning to realize something that we didn't emphasize enough. I think over the last 11 months, we've tended to say, look, there's nothing lost by hoping that Trump is on Europe's side and by going in and being polite to him and flattering him. Actually, something has been lost. This delusion since November that Trump can be pushed over to the European position and isn't actually on Putin's side in this conflict has had a huge cost. And the cost is because Europe had it in its head that there's no way that Ukraine and Europe can win without the US So the only game, even if it doesn't work, is to try to keep the US in the game. And its delusion that maybe the US Is ultimately on Europe's side has actually meant that we have not stepped up with our financing, haven't developed a system for defending the Ukraine independent of the United States. And actually, worse than that, Ukraine has been firing a lot of American missiles, which it probably would have kept in reserve if it had known that the US Was going to stop the future weapons supply. So we're actually in a weaker position now in November in negotiating with Russia than we would have been if we'd been clearer in January that Trump was not on our side. If in January we had said, okay, basically this guy is on Russia's side, we can keep talking to him, but we need from this moment to put a rocket up our whatever and completely transform our defence security funding policy towards Ukraine.

[Alistair Campbell]

Which is kind of what Sikorsky was saying when we talked to the Poland.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. Because the end of this story is always going to be the same, which is a moment is going to come where the United States at best will walk away, but more likely will say, we're not providing key weapons, we're not providing intelligence and security, and we might even go so far as to sanction the Ukrainians because we want to force the Russian position. And at that point, we're not ready. And we should have been getting ready since January for that.

[Alistair Campbell]

You see, I said we weren't going to talk about the budget, but in a way, I think that when the debate was going on about whether Labour should be putting up tax or not, I actually think it could have been and should have been related to this debate, because Britain is not remotely having this debate about whether the French are The French, as I said on that episode we did on Ukraine the other day, the French chief of staff addressing all the mayors of France and saying, are we preparing our people for what might lie ahead? Now, when you and I said that the other night, we had all the bots coming out saying warmongering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But just as what you're saying is we have to take Trump at face value and reach the conclusion that this guy is not on our side, equally we have to take Putin at face value, which is that he's going to keep going. He has not budged an inch in all of the talk that's gone on. And the other thing somebody that I was talking to in sort of spook world was saying, the one thing that they really are shocked by is the extent to which Wyckoff in particular just buys the line from Putin that Russia is winning this war. Now, the Russian economy were subject to a bit more pressure, and Trump did put on the sanctions on the two big oil companies. But then as the other spoke the other day about criticizing Europe when actually he's helping the Russians because Hungary and Slovakia are still buying it.

[Rory Stewart]

Small subtext here also, which was he was supposed to put on enormous sanctions on November 22, which he never did on China. I think this is part of a general pattern of one of the reasons that Trump has lured us into this false sense that maybe the US Is on our side is that in many occasions since January, Trump has signaled, I'm going to sanction Russia, I'm going to put secondary sanctions against, indeed, Turkey. I'm going to say it, the UN That I totally defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine. All these things have convinced us, well, maybe we don't really need to step up. Maybe we're not really going to be in a world where we're fighting this without the US and the fact is, in some ways, it's a contric. In fact, Philip o' Brien at St. Andrews calls this long con. He actually goes as far as says it may be deliberate policy, and it certainly would be from the Russians point of view, which is to keep the illusion going that maybe the US Will remain on Europe's side and by doing so, stop Europe and Ukraine really stepping up.

[Alistair Campbell]

So every time he sort of threatens something, we gratefully, breathlessly take it at face value, think it's going to happen. Then something else happens to make us stop thinking that it was ever going to happen. Yeah, it is conmanship, I think. Yeah.

[Rory Stewart]

Final thing on this. Again and again, the US Will keep Saying this is about the fact that Europe has not spent enough on defence. Hear, hear. We all agree. And therefore Russia is Europe's problem and Europe needs to step up. But the problem is that the US Is not actually saying in this Russia, US Deal, we're going to allow Europe to step up. What it's actually saying is, yes, this is Europe's problem. Europe's facing Russia. Oh, and by the way, we're going to tie Europe's hands behind its back. We're going to make sure they can't put planes forward of Poland, we're going to stop them putting European troops into Ukraine, we're going to stop the expansion of NATO, we're going to constrain the sides of the Ukrainian arm. This is not actually the Elbridge Colby fantasy that the United States is focusing on China and Europe is going to be empowered to push back Russia through Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Nothing of the sort, actually. What the United States, it would be like, I don't know. I keep trying to think of the analogies to illustrate some Americans, but let's say for some weird reason I decided that I was going to go out for the night and put my young child in charge of my house. And I had told him to get ready and do his karate training and he hadn't done it. And then I finally think, okay, well, you didn't do your training training. I'm leaving the house anyway. Fine. But America's going more than that. They're actually saying, and by the way, I'm going to disable the alarm. I'm going to hand a pep astray to the person who's coming in through the door. Farewell. See you later.

[Alistair Campbell]

Very interesting analogy. And I think when your children are on the psychiatrist couch in 20 years time, Roy, they'll be playing this one back. My God, you and I should definitely do a podcast or a book about parenting. We have very different approaches. Anyway, my final point is that, and it's interesting you made the point there about, because you said this when we did the episode the other day where the, the American document said that Poland would host these fighter jets and they talk about NATO hosting them.

[Rory Stewart]

Right.

[Alistair Campbell]

And the other, the other big change, thank God, is they removed all reference to this notion that there should be no comeback for war crimes. They haven't addressed it specifically, they've just removed that.

[Rory Stewart]

What have they done On America making 50% profits?

[Alistair Campbell]

That has gone. What there is, is a total rewrite. There's an acceptance that there's got to be kind of industrial, you know, big investment, UK fund, et cetera, et cetera. And it talks about Ukraine working with the Americans on that. But all reference to United States making 50% profit. And what's amazing, Rory, the number of people who've said to me in the last 48 hours that our podcast was the first, including politicians, our podcast was the first time they were even aware that it had this plan for basically Trump to take 50% of all the proceeds of any reconstruction.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, putting in their money. He was going to take 100 billion of Russian money, 100 billion of European money, and he was going to make all the profit. And let's see what happens. This European proposal. I'm a bit gloomy, but we'll see. Next question from India, who's actually got a question coming in from Johannesburg herself, which is of course where the G20 summit, the summit of the 20 wealthiest nations on Earth, minus one, minus one, the G19, and we'll come to that in a second, was hosted. So when major global forums like the G20 or COP, because actually, extraordinarily this week we've also had the end of the climate summit in Brazil end up functioning because a group of middle powers keep the process alive while the United States either disengages or actively undermines consensus. How useful is these summits in shaping real global outcomes? Are they still effective spaces for cooperation, or have they become platforms that mask the fact that the real decisions are now being made outside formal multilateral settings? Let me have a starter on you for this. Essentially, since the Second World War, the whole multilateral system, this whole idea that instead of just country A doing business with country B is replaced by a system where the whole world gets together and small countries and big countries agree rules, was underpinned by the United States. It was the way that America after 1945, as the kind of big hegemon, 40% of the global economy at the end of the Second World War chose to run the world. They didn't run it like the British Empire, which was bilateral. They decided to create the un, the World bank, the imf, NATO, all this stuff. It's going to be multilateral. And my fear is that when the United States is removed from the system, the basic heart and engine of multilateralism collapses. And the problem started actually earlier with your friend George Bush, because when he comes in is when America leaves Kyoto on climate, when it gets out of some of the ballistic missile and biological weapons stuff, when it leaves the International Criminal Court, that's already the beginning of a America disentangling itself. But by the time you're with Trump, as you say, he doesn't even turn up to the G20, despite the fact America is the next country to host the G20. And of course he doesn't turn up to the climate conference in Brazil.

[Alistair Campbell]

The thing, if you're a European leader, you talk about whether these summits are useful. They have gone, obviously Keir Starmer went to COP, then went to the G20. The European leaders then went straight from there to Angola for the EU Africa summit. So these summits are still going on. Now the question from India is whether they still have merit, I guess underpinning that without the Americans taking part. And I said on the Ukraine episode we did that I'd been speaking to people who were there and it was interesting how they, they sort of feel in a way it matters even more at the moment and that while they're there and while they're addressing some of these issues and when you read the stuff that came out of Johannesburg, there was lots and lots of stuff that hasn't get any coverage here, but actually was about further engagement in Africa. And we've talked a lot on the podcast the extent to which China has been all over Africa militarily, Russia is all over Africa. So I think these summits do still matter. I get why people think, you know, why are these leaders always on a plane, why they're never sort of focused on stuff here. But I think right now, in this kind of weird moment in history that we're at, I think these alliances are going to become more important. The more that America retreats, the more I think that we, uk, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, like minded countries with similar values have got to, we've got to start shaping our own agenda. And that relates to our previous discussion about Ukraine.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think the change in the world though is unbelievable. I mean, if you think back to your time in government, I suppose the four big things probably would be the G7 meeting, the UNGER meeting, the G20 meeting and COP would be the big meetings this year. So G7 was June in Canada, which basically became the G6 plus Trump. Trump left early and went on to do some funny bilateral thing on Ukraine. Whereas actually the year before the G7 had been at the heart of all the Ukraine, Russian sanctions.

[Alistair Campbell]

And he did it very deliberately to say, I'm going off to deal with really big stuff now on my own.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. Then the UN General assembly in September was another extraordinary, weird Trump fest. It was actually used by Netanyahu in Israel as cover for its strikes, with the banning of the Palestinian delegation, et cetera. And now we've had this G20 cop, which America doesn't turn up to at all. And you've also got this other very odd thing happening, which is it isn't really that the middle powers are driving this. Europe and the UK are playing it pretty straight. But if you look at the G20 resolution, Johannesburg, you've got Saudi Arabia, India, signing up to climate agreements, references to a lot of things which are incredibly progressive. And at the same day, in Copen, Brazil, those same countries are blocking any language about eradicating fossil fuels. So the G20 becomes this. Or G19 becomes this talking shop where the very same countries that are screwing up real progress on agreements on climate are making gentle noises about it at the other end of the world.

[Alistair Campbell]

But it also shows how these things develop. So the G20, it emerged out of one of the financial crises that was developing in Asia when Gordon Brown was chancellor. And I remember Gordon being obsessed with this idea that G7 is not the place to have these debates. We've got to bring in all these.

[Rory Stewart]

Other countries, because G7, as we said, is too small. It's only a third of the world economy. G20 is nearly 80% of the world economy. It includes China, Russia, India. India. Yeah.

[Alistair Campbell]

Turkey.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. So it seems a much worse. And if you were going to deal with climate, 80% of the world economy, 90% of the world emissions, it's the G20 that matters.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, but the politics, then. So it's born out of one purpose and then it sort of develops in the way that these things do. So it's now addressing everything. So a very, very, very long communique that was written. The word Ukraine came in once. Why? Because you've got people there at the G20 who aren't in the same place as Europe, who aren't in the same place even as Trump, they're much closer, much, much closer to the. To the Russian line. So there's diplomacy goes on. But I think if you're South African and if you're Ramaphosa, I think you're thinking, actually, you did pretty well here. The other thing that's really interesting, both about COP and the G20, is that they were both this year, for the first time in a while, held in places where protest is possible. Very interesting example of that in South Africa, where femicide and violence against women, women and girls is a really big thing, and where the government is often felt not to have taken it seriously enough. So These protests, one of which was women in 15 towns and cities lying down for 15 minutes in protest at the 15 women murdered every day. And Ramaphosa probably didn't want to be focusing on this so much, but in the end did declare that South Africa had a national emergency when it came to violence against women and girls. So that's just a sign of how protest can have an impact, whether that gets followed through into policy change, attitude change. But I think that was another reason why it was a good thing that the G20 happened. I think from their perspective, it felt like a really big deal, even though Trump wasn't there. And once they got past day one and people had stopped talking about Trump, the ones I talked to said they got a lot done.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I've been talking to people who were at COP and they produced a great line from one of your Dutch footballers saying this was a game that they couldn't win, but the important thing was that they shouldn't lose.

[Alistair Campbell]

Which footballer was it?

[Rory Stewart]

Do you know who was the famous Dutch?

[Alistair Campbell]

Johan Cruyff.

[Rory Stewart]

I think it was Cruyff, yeah. Is that a line that you associate with Cruyff?

[Alistair Campbell]

I don't know. Tell me the game.

[Rory Stewart]

Probably. It works better in Dutch. I think the idea was this is a game we can't win, but, you know, our objective in this game is to make sure we don't lose. So the idea here was that we couldn't come out of the COP with anything substantial. But the worst case scenario was America would completely torpedo the system. More countries would walk out of the climate process. They got to the end of it. We, with America being the only country that's actually walked out, everybody else is still part of it. But that said, my goodness, things are going wrong. I mean, if you look back to the sort of optimism of Paris or even Glasgow, we've been through these very eccentric locations for cops. You remember, we've been through Sharm el Sheikh, we've been through Dubai, we've been through Azerbaijan. But UAE now looks like a sort of beacon of light, because in UAE there was an agreement to phase out fossil fuels. And now in this cop, we had Russia, Saudi Arabia, predictably. But the big thing is India coming out so strongly against any language. So we end up with a situation in which 80 countries sign up to a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and 80 countries reject it. And Brazil got on a total muddle. You know, was this going to be the implementation cop, the People's cop, the truth cop?

[Alistair Campbell]

It was indigenous cop, wasn't it and.

[Rory Stewart]

Even Brazil cop, even Brazil couldn't decide whether what it was doing is selling itself as Lula climate deforestation or was it Brazil as the major oil producer on the side of the fossil fuels? So I think again, we've come out of it with Europe being quite well behaved. They've committed to a 66% reduction by 2030 compared to their levels in 1990 and a 90% reduction by 2050. China did make some commitments. China is not totally like in Saudi India in this, but China's commit was 10%. It was well below about a third of what people were pushing for. And the fundamental story remains that every year we continue to put about 2 parts per million into the atmosphere. Every year we continue to generate about 80% of our energy from fossil fuels. So even though the renewable bit goes up, the fossil fuel bit goes up just as much as the renewable bit and we're not remotely on track for one and a half degrees. The most you could say, you know, might my friend who'd very sweetly been through this whole COP crisis, absolute optimist and wants to believe in it, he said, well, what we achieved is if it hadn't been for Paris, he would have been on track for four degrees. We're now on track for two and a half. And where of course I'm going to be grumpy is grumpy, Roy is that despite this panel on global inequality is getting worse. All the figures are the inequality is getting worse and they've done. The British government has massacred its international development budget. It's less than half of what it was even five years ago. The US government has wiped out its international development assistance. The number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa has gone from about 180 million in 1980 to about 470 million today. And every indicator of inequality across the world seems to be going wrong. Inequality of income, inequality of wealth, stagnation of median incomes. So without any money and with everything going in the wrong direction, what on earth is this panel going to do, consisting of of Spain, Brazil and South Africa?

[Alistair Campbell]

Oh, Roy, being so cynical like this. They're providing a useful leadership role on a vital debate for the future of the planet. And they say this too. This is straight out of New labor book. The first bit. Too much wealth and power is in the hands of the few goes on as monopolists reign over entire industries, including much of the media and the 21st century town square of social media. So there's a debate that they need to have and they need to do more about.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. I mean, it's.

[Alistair Campbell]

Which is harder without America, for sure.

[Rory Stewart]

So the thing that breaks my heart is that things that you and I violently agree on and values that we would have taken for granted, when you now say them aloud, seem beginning to feel more and more naive and mad. I was looking at the UN General assembly in September. The UN General assembly just three months ago was committed to leaving no one behind, acting together for the advancement of peace, sustainable development and human dignity for present and future generations. Now, what can we possibly disagree with that statement? And yet, for the first time, thanks to Trump, Putin, Modi and the rest of them, it's beginning to seem a bit ridiculous.

[Alistair Campbell]

Right?

[Rory Stewart]

These phrases are beginning to seem laughable.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, they might be. You've got to keep. You've got a whole. You've got to keep fighting for noble causes, Rory. You can't just. You can't give up now. Let's go to UK Nick Moss from Hexum. Nathan Gill's conviction raises serious security concerns for Reform uk. As a former senior UKIP figure and mep, he repeatedly promoted pro Russia lines. Yet there's no sign Reform's leadership ever questioned this. Given their close ties to Gill, their silence invites doubt about what they knew and whether they condoned his actions. Why isn't this receiving more scrutiny from Reform voters and the general public? If Reform is poised to enter government, these unanswered questions could pose a national security risk. I've got to be honest with you, I am banging my head against a wall on this one. So today, Tuesday, there is finally a bit of coverage about Nigel Farage on the media, and it's about whether he did or did not use racist abuse against his fellow pupils at Dulwich College.

[Rory Stewart]

That's a school at school.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah. Serious to be examined. Fair. Fair enough. But Nathan Gill should by now be a household name on a par with the spies of the past. You know, Philby has gone into British historical legend. Okay. Even since the conviction, I have been doing events and saying, who here has heard of Nathan Gill? And, yes, it's gone up a little bit from the 0% of last week, but we're still talking single figures. That is a total chronic failure. We're going to talk a bit about the BBC of our media, who have chosen that because their chosen narrative right now is Farage is en route for power to overlook virtually one of the most significant political, diplomatic, security and crime stories of modern times.

[Rory Stewart]

Very good. Well, given, as you say, that only a small percentage of people have Heard of Nathan Gill. Let me try to explain who Nathan Gill is. If you're right, 92% of our listeners haven't heard about Nathan Gill.

[Alistair Campbell]

More of our listeners will have. But it is shocking how badly our media is reported this.

[Rory Stewart]

So Nathan Gill was a politician associated with all the different incarnations of Nigel Farage's party, which was of course UKIP and then the Brexit Party and then Reform. And he kept moving as Farage moved between them.

[Alistair Campbell]

And he was their leader in Wales.

[Rory Stewart]

Yep. He was the member of the European Parliament for ukip. He was then in the Welsh National Assembly. Then he was re elected in the Brexit party and became leader of Reform in Wales. And in 2018, 2019, he began to develop these very close relationships, particularly with a man called Oleg Voloshin, who was a Ukrainian member of Parliament. Very, very close to Ukrainian oligarchs, to a man called Medvedchuk, and also to a whole media industry. And what they began doing is giving cash to Nathan Gillet. Now, turns out they probably gave him some 30, 40,000 pounds. It turns out to be extremely cheap to bribe British members of parliament. £5,000 at a time. It's not like a million pounds in a thing. And what they got him to do was to read out speeches in the European Parliament defending this media enterprise. So it's basically a pro Russian media operation that was running in Ukraine, attacking Zelenskyy and making the Russian point of view and doing all it could to undermine the Ukrainian position against Russia. And the Ukrainians were moving to shut down this media, which they thought was a Russian push of influence. And Nathan Gill gives a speech in the European Parliament which is worth bearing in mind when you're being suspicious of politicians. I've watched the whole speech. It's not as you would expect. What he actually says is, I'm very much on Ukraine's side. I'm very much against Russia's invasion of Crimea. I very much believe in the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, but free of speech. And, you know, it's very unfortunate that this country that I support is shutting down this media organization and we need to allow freedom of speech to happen in this country for which he gets money. And the man who gives money then has a meeting with Putin the following day and is reformed.

[Alistair Campbell]

He says how well he's doing in getting this MVP to, but that just shows you the fact that Putin takes an interest in this. But what's interesting about Reform's reaction, since the conviction they can't believe their luck. I even Suspected that this morning Reform would think, oh, great, they're going on about Nigel being a racist when he was a kid. Kid. Rather than this, which is much, much more serious. Honestly. If I were the Labour government right now, I would publish all the stuff that came emerged during the Brexit referendum. I would have a major inquiry into Russian interference in our democracy. And you can throw in China as well. And you can just because we are pretending, we're pretending that this isn't really a problem. And the media is totally playing into that game.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. And. And we have to be very careful on what we're suggesting here. But it might be worth asking some questions about some other people from Nathan Gill's party who were several who have mentioned, who were also making speeches in the European Parliament in favor of the same pro Russian media organization, served on the board of the same pro Russian media organization who absolutely deny that they took any payment from Russia to do this. But it's pretty peculiar that they're all making speeches in favor of it, serving on the board of it, turning up to meetings with it. And so that's worth looking into. But clearly what we need to ask is, is there a bigger systemic problem here? So Oleg Woloshin and actually a man called Janus, who was the Polish agent in all of this. A lot of this is coming from their debriefing. Janus's debriefing by Polish intelligence and in particular his whatsapps. And they were connected to many, many members of Parliament and members of European Parliament all the way across Europe. So far, only one of them has been prosecuted. Now, we're not going to get into legal problems by accusing individuals by name or even implying anything by name, but there is a much bigger investigation that needs to happen. Is it actually plausible that there was only one involved? So somebody needs to, I would imagine, if you were investigating this, look at the other people who were making speeches at the same time and check whether this was genuinely their views. Or is it a bit odd that they were making almost identical speeches to Nathan Gill on the same issue, serving on the same boards, going to the same meetings. We need to look at people across the system who had contact with these people. I mean, again, you know very much. Nigel Farage will say in his defense, I'm sure that the fact that he had a photograph with Nadia Barodi, who then pops up in the same photographs and because she's the partner of Oleg Voloshin, or that Marchevsky, who does the poise of Europe and is closed down by The Czechs isn't indirectly connected. Well, fine. May all be enormous coincidence, they may just have been foolish. They may have been caught with the wrong photograph in the same way that you and I often get photographs of people. But there's clearly a much, much bigger system going on here and I'm a bit suspicious about the fact that only Nathan Gill and the whole of Europe, Europe has so far been prosecuted.

[Alistair Campbell]

Several MEPs were their names came out in evidence in court. I've barely seen them anywhere. I've certainly not seen them pursued by the media to be asked the sort of questions you're putting all of these other names who have not been in the papers but have been raised in court, they all deny any wrongdoing. So take them at face value. But your question about whether there is something bigger and systemic going on. My hunch is if Vladimir Putin is sitting at a desk waiting for his man to come back, back and report how they're getting on with Nathan Gill, I don't think Vladimir Putid would just sit there interested in one mep. And likewise Richard Tice, big figure now, never off the television in Reform uk. He said he never met the guy. So you talk about pictures, then pictures emerge and the pictures emerge of him sort of being. Introducing him at speeches. So they're trying to do exactly what News International did when the phone. Actually things started. One bad apple. One bad apple. Very good headline in the Daily Mirror today. Any more Vlad Apples, Nigel? I think we need to know, as Nigel Farage might say. I'm only asking questions here, Nigel. I think we need to know the answers.

[Rory Stewart]

But there's the bigger issue of corruption in general. I mean, we've talked about this before. We've talked about the way that Azerbaijan basically corrupted a whole series of British and European members of Parliament. Parliament through its caviar diplomacy. We've talked about the way that European parliamentarians were found with bags of cash, almost certainly from a Middle Eastern state, trying to bribe them to do stuff. And I think we haven't begun to think about the ways in which the American private sector can begin to corrupt our members of Parliament. And what do I mean by corrupt? What I mean is it'd be much more difficult to catch them in a sense. Actually. The Russians and the Gulf states were handing over catching cash, are being naive. They're doing it in a too obvious way. It's extremely easy to change the behavior of our members of Parliament if you are a big American tech company by saying, come and give a speech for which we will Pay you X thousand, or here's an opportunity after you leave Parliament to help us with consultancy or here's some stuff that we can do in your constituency, non party political, but helping you with the digital infrastructure in your constituency and understanding how to use these platforms, and that general sense that these are powerful, wealthy organizations that could give you money, that could do you harm, that could be useful to you, can do an extraordinary amount to stop parliamentarians regulating those social media companies, confronting them, calling them out. And so I think we need to worry about our democracy, not just in the really obvious, here's some dirty bundles of cash, but all the other ways in which different countries use paid trips, parties, gifts to get people on their side.

[Alistair Campbell]

You know, we'll talk about the BBC in a minute. I mean, how many days did Angela Rayner's stamp duty issue lead the news, lead the newspapers? I mean, and to be honest, even now, it's not that long ago. I can't remember the full detail, but at the time you turn on the television, you turn on the radio, you open the newspaper, it was wall to wall. We're talking now about a guy who is presenting himself as the next Prime Minister who has thus far, so far as I can work out, addressed this issue. 0 Other than saying he was a bad apple. And you know what made me that reminded me of it was exactly the defense used by News International over the phone app. One bad apple. Well, let's be assured of that by properly investigating Russia's attempted influence on UK democracy. And that will involve talking to people like Farage, other party leaders, etc. But we are kidding ourselves if we think that Russia puts this at your point about this going to Putin. This is a strategic interest for them. Putin taking an interest in the corruption of a Welsh member of the European Parliament. Right. Who else? And what else is he interested in?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, there's a wonderful book by a man called Chekhovstov who's based in Vienna. It's called Russia and the Western Far Right. Looking at this whole relationship and it's not just what's going on here with Brexit, reform, ukip, it's what's going on with the Front national in, in France, where you end up with them taking huge loans from Russian banks. It's to do with the way that they're inviting people from the German AfD, their far right party, over to meetings in Moscow.

[Alistair Campbell]

They're getting plenty in return in terms.

[Rory Stewart]

Of the politics of pro Russian statements. And he continues to develop this. The golden dawn in Greece et Cetera, et cetera. This has been a Russian policy really at the heart of Russian intelligence since the 1920s, 1930s. One of the great chiefs of what KGB became the svr, said, the difference between us and the British is that we're not fundamentally an intelligence gathering organization. We're fundamentally about destabilizing and shaping other people's politics, by the way in which we create connections with social media, opposition groups, party members, party leaders. So this Russian move is part of a much broader Russian move across many, many different trends. There will be be hundreds of Russian intelligence officers working in different ways through different intermediaries to shape the space. And basically what they want to do is shape the space against liberal democracy, against NATO, against the European Union. And they see all these groups as being proto Brexit groups. So destroying the European Union, pro Russia groups, destroying NATO, pro Trump groups, undermining liberal democracy and the rule of law. And all of that is to Putin's advantage.

[Alistair Campbell]

And you and I, for saying things like that get portrayed by people on the right and on the hard left, apologies, sort of cranks, almost like paranoid cranks. But the point is they do this stuff for a reason. And Nathan Gill should be a massive, massive warning cry to the rest of our politics and our democracy and the extent to which both politics and media, it seems to me, are now just saying, oh well, Nathan Gill's gone to jail, that's the end of that. It's pathetic.

[Rory Stewart]

And more MPs need to speak out. And I'm worried that one of the reasons more MPs aren't speaking out is that they all have a bit of a guilty conscience. There are far too many all party parliamentary groups sponsored by foreign governments, paying for MPs to go on guided trips, sharing the propaganda of those countries to them. All this stuff should be stopped. We should have much, much stricter rules against trips, benefits, lobbying.

[Alistair Campbell]

Not against this trip.

[Rory Stewart]

Not against this trip. The rest is politics.

[Alistair Campbell]

No sanctions on trip. Okay, Roy, let's take a break and then come back and talk about the BBC west bank and also Addiction Awareness Week.

[Rory Stewart]

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[Rory Stewart]

Welcome back to the Restless Politics with.

[Alistair Campbell]

Me, Rory Stewart and me Alistair Campbell.

[Rory Stewart]

And this next question is brought to you by People's Postcode Lottery and on.

[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

And to mark that milestone, they've asked a fitting question. Of all the moments that define us as a species, from fire to flight, democracy to discovery. Guy, I like the alliteration. What's the biggest ever human achievement?

[Alistair Campbell]

I think the biggest ever political human achievement, I actually do think it relates to global public health. I think the efforts that have been made successfully to eradicate some diseases and massively to cut down on others, malaria, TB, AIDS, etc. I think I put that right up there.

[Rory Stewart]

I'd maybe develop that and say underneath that. The biggest ever human achievement, I think, is our ability to actually think about other humans. Humans and other species. We are very, very selfish in many ways. As a species. We have a real tendency to be like, let's look after our own families, ourselves first. But the amazing thing, along with all the damage we've done in the world, is we did have an idea of international development, we did have an idea of tackling global poverty, of trying to work together on climate change, of setting up democracies where people have equal rights. Rights of having a redistributive tax system, where wealthier people contribute to people who are less well off of having systems where in the end, we actually do begin to care about nature, conservation, the environment. So I think our biggest achievement as a species is we're not quite as selfish as we sometimes think. And I think I want to resilient as well.

[Alistair Campbell]

Keep going.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, we'll sort of lean into it. I mean, we should lean into our generosity. I here's a question for you. How many Southern White Rhinos do you think there were? About 1905.

[Alistair Campbell]

I have got no idea, Rory.

[Rory Stewart]

Okay, answer is about 25. How many do you think there are today?

[Alistair Campbell]

More than that.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, 25,000.

[Alistair Campbell]

There we go.

[Rory Stewart]

So that's an interesting example when we're generally very gloomy about humans because a.

[Alistair Campbell]

Lot of species are being lost.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. And we're doing huge damage to biodiversity, but just occasionally humans are able to pull their socks up, concentrate, target a species and improve it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, one of my favorite current show of hands, in my show of hands obsession speaking events is we talk about everything's going well and the government's this and the government's that. And then when it gets really moany, I'll just say, okay, let's Just hold on, hands up, if you quite enjoy your life and every puts their hands up and I think that's. It's sort of worth, it is worth holding on to that. We're quite a. We're quite an optimistic sort of breed, really.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. Maybe the biggest ever human achievement isn't one invention or moment. It is as you suggested, Alistair, the way we keep moving forward together.

[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

Because just like progress itself, I guess this is built on connection. Millions of people taking part or contributing to something bigger.

[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

Here'S a question for you. Jackie Muggleton, trip member, Wiltshire. Thank you, Jackie, for being a trip member. Is it now time for Starmer to stand up to Trump to defend our BBC?

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, if you haven't seen my speech on behalf of Geir Starmer about the BBC, which we did when we were on tour, strongly recommend and how's your.

[Rory Stewart]

Campaign for becoming Director General? How's that going?

[Alistair Campbell]

I think it's a non starter but I've got to tell you, Rory, yesterday I was, I watched some of the evidence, the DCMS committee of the BBC executives, but I found it very, very frustrating on many levels. So I gave up and while I was then went off and doing something else and I started to get these messages saying, they're talking about you at the DCMS committee. I thought, oh, great, somebody's decided they should throw my hat, my name into the ring. But in fact, what it was was Robbie Gibb, Theresa May's former communications director, was being asked how he thought the Conservative Party would react if Keir Starmer appointed Alistair Campbell to the board of the BBC. And Robbie Gibbs reply, was that a bit of a sort of faux humility at the start. He said, well, I don't think I was as good as my job as Alistair was at his. And in the event, I'd worked for the BBC for a very, very long time. But it's a good question. I've actually had since saying half in jest on tour that I'd like to be the Director General. I've had more than one person from within the BBC say, go for it. Here's a question for you, Rory. How important do you think of voices in public life? The physical voice?

[Rory Stewart]

I think incredibly important. I think this is a fundamental problem for Keir Starmer, unfortunately. I think his voice sounds strange, nerdy and strangled.

[Alistair Campbell]

Because I thought Samir Shah's voice was a real problem yesterday. He just sounded really weak. So when the thing being put towards him is giving weak leadership of the BBC at a time of crisis, it didn't really help. The committee didn't do a good job, though. I'm sorry, but it was just a sort of friendly chat with them all. It wasn't forensic.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I chaired the Defence Select Committee briefly, and I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee for four years before that. And I was struck by the fact that we were not remotely as prepared. I testified to the Senate and that's something. I testified to the senate. I think 2008 made. They are really shy about Afghanistan. Yeah. And they have their staffers preparing every question and it's completely legalistic and they're drilling into it. I felt that we let people off too much. Often the chair are thinking, well, you have one question. As soon as you've got them on the rope, it moves on to the next MP. Some law firms offered training, but actually very few MPs turned up for that training. I mean, there's a general story around professionalism, training of MPs and ministers.

[Alistair Campbell]

Apparently. Caroline Dinage is the chair of the committee. She was on the Westminster hour or 10 o' clock news, on the radio, apparently, and said that she didn't think the board was in safe hands. So maybe that was the judgment they discussed afterwards. But I think that the witnesses will have left thinking, because they did prepare and the message they wanted to get out was that we're united and we care about the BBC. But there was no. That's why I gave up. It just wasn't forensic, it wasn't a proper interrogation.

[Rory Stewart]

Such a fascinating thing, isn't it? So the chair of the BBC, I suppose, came up at the tail end of the last Conservative government and you can see how different the world is, because I was having a few very informal conversations about whether that was something I might be interested in. Right. Chair of the BBC. Fast forward 14 months. It's kind of unimaginable that a figure like me could be chair of the BBC. The thing has become so politicized and complicated. Whereas Chris Patton, of course, was chair of the BBC. Right. He's not massively different. Kind of a centrist Tory. I May be not as senior as Chris Patton, but we're now in a world in which it's almost unimaginable that a former politician could be chair of the BBC.

[Alistair Campbell]

Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to say that politicians should be ruled out. But, yeah, it was very, very, very disappointing. I always got the feeling that when I turned up at select committees as a witness, that they had prepared quite well.

[Rory Stewart]

But you presumably didn't feel as worried as you did when he went in front of Hutton or Judge led or lawyer led inquiry.

[Alistair Campbell]

Not at all.

[Rory Stewart]

Because what I discover, select committees, and the masterclass was always William Hague, is that if you turned up and massively flattered the committee, they all curled over. Didn't matter which party they came with and took it.

[Alistair Campbell]

There was lots of. That's a very good question. I think a lot about that.

[Rory Stewart]

They've learned that, right, the only people who get in trouble are the people who try to be antsy and argue back against the committee, and then the MPs can sort of slightly wake up and start going a bit harder. But if you spend your whole time being incredibly subservient and polite to the MPs, are so flattered to have a foreign secretary or a chairman of the BBC be polite to them, which is not their normal experience in their constituencies, that they stop asking hard questions immediately.

[Alistair Campbell]

Now, Thomas in Bristol, what explains the lack of international attention to the West Bank's collapsing economy, made dramatically worse by intensified Israeli restrictions as the Gaza war? And what are the implications of this silence for regional stability? Now, I know you've been looking at this, but just before that, that I think this is so relevant as well to the discussion about Ukraine, because it's not that long ago that Trump was parading in front of huge great signs saying Peace 2025 and saying that he had delivered peace and stability? There have been over 300 Palestinians killed since then. There have been Israelis killed as well, and it's as if it's not happening. So what's Thomas's worry about the economy in the West Bank?

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, so this, of course, is about the west bank, not Gaza and other people words, those bits of Palestinian territory in the west, towards Jordan, so Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, et cetera. Fundamentally, the Palestinian economy is an import economy that's completely cut off from the world and it's controlled by the Israeli state, divided up into areas A, B and c. And before October 7, it was often in trouble because of security rationales. So checkpoints go up, difficult to move back and forth. But since October 7, the Finance Minister, Bazal Smotridge, who is on the very, very far right of Israeli politics, has used his position as Finance Minister to completely cripple the economy of the West Bank. There's been very good work done by this, by a man called Joost Hiltmann, who's connected with International Crisis Group. We interviewed Comfort Ero from the ICG a bit earlier. But there are three ways in which it's being crippled. One of them is quite technical, which we're not going to get into on this show, which is about an excess shekel problem and about how you convert Israeli cash back into bank accounts. The second problem, though, is a really big problem, which is about customs clearance. So because it's an import economy, the money that traditionally came to the Palestinians Authority was from import taxes, and the Israeli government collects those as import taxes, pass them on. And there are two problems. One is they haven't been passing them on. And the second is they've been putting more and more charges on them before they pass them on under various excuses. So even if they did pass them on, they'd only pass on about 35% of the income. So currently the Palestinians are facing a 2.5 billion black hole, which doesn't allow them really to pay for anything. They can't pay for their civil servants, they can't pay for their public services. They basically can't keep going because Israel has this financial a grip on their windpipes through Smotrich. And then the final thing which could actually collapse the entire system if Smotrich were allowed to get away with it. And everybody's gambling Netanyahu won't less him, is that the entire Palestinian economy depends on Israeli banks. It's the only way of getting money in and out. And he might stop the letters which give indemnity to Israeli banks, which would basically destroy the entire banking system of Palestine, and that would be the end of the entire Palestinian economy. Now, the US treasury trump putting pressure on Netanyahu, and the hope is that Netanyahu isn't going to go that far.

[Alistair Campbell]

But the World bank has published a report warning that this could lead to the absolute collapse of the Palestinian Authority economy.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. And two, so it's a form of.

[Alistair Campbell]

Economic warfare alongside the psychological warfare that Ben GVIR and Smotrich essentially saying that Mahmoud Abbas should be taken out, that other members of the Palestinian government should be executed. That's a sort of psychological warfare going on inside the military and the economic.

[Rory Stewart]

And then there's the people bit. Because 240,000 Palestinians worked in Israel and were sent back after October 7, none of them returned to work, they're all out of work. And more and more gates have now emerged around and between each different settlement movement is becoming increasingly impossible. So this is mass unemployment, massive collapse in government revenue, threats to the banking system, real problems with inflation and the cash economy. And this macroeconomic damage increasingly deliberate. I mean, before October 7th, some of this stuff happened under a security pretense. Now it is quite clearly driven by Smotrich as a punishment measure.

[Alistair Campbell]

But it does go back to the, in a sense the, I don't know whether it's strategic or tactical, but the sort of, the stupidity in a way of the attack in the first place. You had lots of people going backwards and forwards every day. And okay, there might be a bit of buggeration from time to time, but essentially Palestinians could go to Israel, they were working in Israel, getting paid remittances, being taken back to Palestine. That's all gone. So all of the economic pressure has kind of been one way.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, absolutely. And again, why was this not tied into the so called peace plan when that Donald Trump and your friend Tony Blair were putting this all together? This is exactly the kind of stuff that should have been specified and tied into it. Because if there's no economy in the west bank, those millions of Palestinians in the only part that Palestinians not in Gaza can't function at all. But for some reason that wasn't in the deal.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, in the deal or the plan was the statement that there would be prosperity for Palestinians who have suffered so much.

[Rory Stewart]

Yes, but as you will remember from the Good Friday Agreement, what you you need, it's not just a statement about prosperity. You need to talk about excess shekels, you need to talk about bank indemnity, you need to talk about customs revenue and percentages of customer. The devil's in the details. And it's through the details that smartrich is crushing the economy of the West Bank. Yeah, well, question for you as we come towards the end, maybe the last serious question. Joe Wolff, who's a TRIP member from London. With the sheer scale of addiction we see worldwide, worldwide, a billion obese people, a billion smokers, 400 million alcoholics, according to international organizations, social media, et cetera. Why do we not see addiction as an infringement on individual freedom when getting customers addicted is the intended outcome of these industries?

[Alistair Campbell]

Ah, I know who Joe Wolff is. He wrote a very, very, very good piece for the New world about this a few weeks ago which essentially saying this is the business model, bottle of tobacco, of alcohol, of gambling, etc.

[Rory Stewart]

And social media.

[Alistair Campbell]

And social media. Social Media 100 is to get you addicted. Yeah. So I think it was really interesting this week. I've been done a bit of stuff with Addiction Awareness Week with the Forward Trust who are behind it. Very, very, very pleased, Rory, to see that the daughter in law of your friend the King was spearheading this this week.

[Rory Stewart]

The Princess World.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah. As you know, I'm not a monarchist, but the extent to which if those guys embrace an issue issue, it can move the dial. I remember one of the saddest things I think about the whole William Harry bust up is that when those two were campaigning together on mental health, they were pretty formidable.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah.

[Alistair Campbell]

In terms of the arguments they pursued, the way they pursued them.

[Rory Stewart]

But it's also, I mean just on the royalty point very quickly before we get back to addiction, I think it's really good what the Princess Wales has been doing. So she's been doing stuff on addiction in general. She's also specifically been talking about trying to encourage not people not to use phones at meal times and so stuff. But it also requires a public that is receptive to that because if it went wrong, of course you would get people saying how dare the Royal family tell me whether or not I should use the phone at a mealtime. What do they understand about my life? So it shows that she has at the moment enough goodwill and legitimacy to be able to lead these campaigns well.

[Alistair Campbell]

And also you have to do them over time. So like, you know your friend the King, he has been going on about the environment and the built environment for decades. But I just thought the way she did it this week was really, really powerful and very, very affected because she was talking about it and that was getting the headlines and what have you. But on the back of it and because I still think we've got problems with stigma around addiction and around mental illness more general. So around the, on the back of it we were being encouraged, lots of people being encouraged, not just well known people, but everybody to share their stories on social media on the theme of the conversation that changed everything.

[Rory Stewart]

And you did a very powerful one, which I watched.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, I did, I did it about.

[Rory Stewart]

We'll put in the newsletter as well, link. I mean, tell us a little bit about it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, I did it about. It was when the guy, Mike Trace, who's the former drug czar in our government, he phoned me up and he's involved in this addiction awareness stuff. And he said, would I do one? And literally, as he asked me the question, the conversation that I then relayed literally popped back into my head.

[Rory Stewart]

Remind us the conversation.

[Alistair Campbell]

It was a guy called. It was 1986. I was in hospital, having been arrested and then released on condition I went for medical treatment. And. And this guy from Paisley, Ernest Benny, now sadly dead, but he basically just this very nice, calm guy. I'd been medicated for a few days. I was calmer than I had been. And he just said to me, of all the reasons why you're here, do you think excessive alcohol might be one of them? I said, no, I've had a breakdown. I was hearing voices. Yeah, okay, okay. He said, do you ever record what you drink? And I said, no, why would I do that? He said, some people do. He said, I noticed when your belongings were brought back by the police, you keep a diary. I said, I do. He said, if we went through your diary recent days, do you think you'd be able to remember how much you had to drink? And I'm now getting irritated. Boy, where's this guy going? Why can't he just believe me that these terrible forces are trying to destroy my brain and I'm being tested by God, God and all the other mad stuff that I believed at the time? And I said, okay, yeah. So he definitely deliberately chose one of the pages that was most manic with my tiny, ridiculous scribbling and what have you. She said, take me through that day. And my first words were, on the day. On the day where woke up, threw up, waited for Fiona to go out, threw up again, went through. And then as I got through to about 1120, tea, went to the Lord High Admiral pub, didn't record how much I drink, chatted to so and so, working on such and such. Okay. And I went through it, and then I got to lunch with David Mellor, the former cabinet minister. And so the Ernest Benny was saying, and would you. Would you. Would you have had anything to drink at lunchtime? I said, yeah, a bit of wine. Any idea how much? Couple of bottles. Suddenly, this very, very large penny dropped.

[Rory Stewart]

Why is it so powerful for him to do it through these very gentle questions? What would your emotional reaction have been if he'd been more explicit from the beginning in saying this has been done by alcohol?

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, it would have been the emotional reaction. Would have been the emotional reaction that subsequently I realized had been the reaction I was using to anybody who suggested to me that I was drinking too much Like Fiona or my friends or colleagues. And you do this thing of saying, when somebody says to you, do you think you've got a problem? You say, why are you saying that you're the one with the problem for asking that, you turn it right back on them. So I think he just had a way. Maybe it was experience, maybe he'd been through that process lots and lots of times before. Maybe just that he had found me at my rock bottom and he kind of opened it up. He's such a nice guy and of course I saw him quite a bit. And then, then a few years later, I made a documentary about my breakdown for the BBC. And this brilliant researcher, Judith Dawson, used to work for Sky. She tracked him down in retirement. And we had this meeting at his house where he was living, and he said, you know what? I've often wondered if it was you. I've seen you, I've seen you. I've often wondered, is that Alastair Campbell, who I had back in 1980?

[Rory Stewart]

He hadn't put the two together.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, there's no reason why he should have done. You know, Alistair Campbell's quite a common name in Scotland, right. He probably, probably wasn't the only Alistair Campbell he'd ever, he'd ever treated. And so he said, I'm so happy to have made the. Made the reconnection. And I said to him, well, I'm no word of a lie. And I dedicated my first novel to this guy before I re met him and. And I said, no word of a lie. I honestly think that conversation saved my life. And he said, it's very nice to hear that. But, you know, you'd be amazed how often, often it's something unexpected that will just open the door. And that's why I think this theme of the conversation that changed everything is.

[Rory Stewart]

And also how wonderful that he responded so modestly. I think that's a wonderful story, Alistair, and I think we're going to use that to wrap up the question time. And thank you very much.

[Alistair Campbell]

And by the way, anybody who's listening, who's got any sort of conversation, just go on social media, post a film of yourself, up to two minutes. Just a conversation that changed everything on the theme of addiction. And make sure you hashtag letstalkaddiction and mention the forward trust for that.

[Rory Stewart]

On the forward trust and addiction. And for many of the other issues that we've discussed today, including the Ukraine peace plan and articles and books, please sign up on the restlesspolitics.com to our newsletter, which hopefully will Keep the conversation going in more detail. And one final thing before we go. So when I was an mp, it used to be a tradition certainly in my constituency to have an annual Christmas card competition.

[Alistair Campbell]

And let me guess, lots of primary school children were encouraged to draw nice sheep from Cumbria. And Jesus Christ.

[Rory Stewart]

Year was Ellie, who was, I think, six and did a lovely picture of angels. And who probably now, I guess must be well into her 20s. But anyway. Yeah, yes, absolutely. So at Trip, we'd like to open it up to all children who listen to podcast here and abroad. And the top three designs that we get will get an annual trip plus membership.

[Alistair Campbell]

Oh, Lord. So. So hold on. All around the world.

[Rory Stewart]

Yep.

[Alistair Campbell]

People can design Christmas cards. How do they send them?

[Rory Stewart]

They take a photograph and then they email it in and you can see the details on our website.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay, so we have to have a deadline. Let's set the deadline of December. December 10th.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah.

[Alistair Campbell]

You send your Christmas card design to. The rest is politicsgoalhanger.com. you have the title Christmas card. And are we the judges?

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah.

[Alistair Campbell]

Do my Grinch.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. If you don't get that job at the BBC, you know, you might be able to get a job as a Christmas.

[Alistair Campbell]

So it could have been the dredger of the BBC, but I'm now a Christmas card judge.

[Rory Stewart]

That's it. Looking forward to the cards. Thank you.

[Alistair Campbell]

And I will see you again, Rory, very, very soon, because 12:30 Wednesday, Rachel Rees presents her budget. And not long thereafter we shall opine.

[Rory Stewart]

Looking forward to it. See you then, Alastair.

[Alistair Campbell]

Bye.

[Rory Stewart]

Bye.

[Alistair Campbell]

See you. Bye.

[Rory Stewart]

As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division one, national consensus still stands for firm roast potatoes.

[Alistair Campbell]

Oh, God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to the Rest is Politics.

[Rory Stewart]

Plus, it's the thoughtful kind of present ad, free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q&As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our miniseries, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.

[Alistair Campbell]

So think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer?

[Rory Stewart]

And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No cues rapping or panic, the membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day.

[Alistair Campbell]

So spray a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.